The Chatom plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
20° on Nov. 16, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1961. Next is 25° in 1997.
Chatom’s center stands about 190 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 120 ft to 260 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Miocene Series undifferentiated (sand, clay), from the Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, clay. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Chatom reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Little Bassetts Creek, Bassetts Creek, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 120 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chatom; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Chatom has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 60 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Chatom normally reaches 69° and falls to 43°. The record high is 84°, in 1993; the record low 26°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 2.00 in, fell in 1961.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 at Jackson, 20 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
